All posts tagged ‘GeekDads’

Eat like a hobbit this Thanksgiving. And be thankful for the geeky things in your life. [Image: Warner Bros. Pictures/MGM]

So you’re a little unhappy about spending Turkey Day with your estranged _________ (fill in the blank family member). And just try to forget that every time you make a pie crust, it just never seems to come out right.

Here at GeekDad, we’re actually pretty psyched by some developments in the geekosphere, as well as stuff that’s going on in our personal lives. So in the spirit of past GeekDad “what to be thankful” posts, let us present a few of our contributors and what makes us grateful:

I’m thankful for …

… the new Hobbit movie, and thankful that it’s coming very soon.

… that we get to live in Middle-earth for three Hobbit films, not just two.

… that new Star Wars movies are in the works (even as I have lots of unanswered questions about how Disney is going to make them. Then again, can the Mouse House do a worse job with Episodes 7-9 than Lucas did with Episodes 1-3?)

… Game of Thrones. Say no more.

… Doctor Who in Your Pocket, Inflatable Cthulhu Arm, Super Awesome Trading Cards and all the geeky silliness over at Archie McPhee.

geek

Noun. Slang. A person whose interests ALWAYS take precedence over popularity or conformity. A person who displays the willingness to bear the public shame of liking some weird thing and not caring who knows it.

Back in a previous life, when I was studying for an A.M. in social sciences at the University of Chicago, I did some thinking about group formation. This was right at the end of the Balkans War. One of the things which becomes apparent if you study history is that it is much easier to build a group identity around who is not part of the group, than it is to actually describe why people are included in a group. So for instance, Serbians found it easier after the breakup of Yugoslavia to define what it meant to be Serbian by saying they were not like Bosnians and Croats than they did to define exactly what it meant to be Serbian. This led to conflict, even though these three ethnic groups had lived peaceably in Yugoslavia for nearly fifty years. In the same way, during the period from about 1880 to 1945 one influential way Germans understood what it meant to be a good German was by describing it as everything that wasn’t Jewish.

Before any of us starts feeling smug, we ought to remember this kind of identity formation for groups takes place all the time in small and large ways, whether that is in social groups, in business, or academia. When building a coherent group out of a disparate bunch of people it is much easier to say things like “that activity isn’t geeky” or “you aren’t a geek” than to say “this is what it means to be a geek.”

Due to several of our usual podcasters being too busy at the moment, we are, alas, forced to cancel this week’s GeekDads podcast, which we would ordinarily record tonight. HipTrax will be back next week on schedule, though, and the GeekDads podcast will record again on the night of April 10th. We hope you can join us in the chatroom then!

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead, Matt Blum, Jonathan Liu, Z and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a biweekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead, Matt Blum, Jonathan Liu, Z and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a biweekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.

Ken, Matt, Jonathan, and James talk about the Hobbit trailer, games we got for Christmas, and more. Enjoy!

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead, Matt Blum, Jonathan Liu, Z and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a biweekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.

Ken, Matt, Jonathan, and James talk about the Hobbit trailer, games we got for Christmas, and more. Enjoy!

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead, Matt Blum, Jonathan Liu, Z and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a biweekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead, Matt Blum, Jonathan Liu, Z and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a biweekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.

GeekDad.com is the parenting blog at Wired.com, edited by Ken Denmead, Matt Blum, Jonathan Liu, Z and Chris Anderson. It is a community of like-minded geeky parents writing about our experiences raising our kids in the digital age, and about our obsessions with technology, family-friendly projects, and pop-culture. The GeekDads podcast is a biweekly discussion of anything and everything that impacts us as geeks and parents.